"We’re still a few years away — the largest company by revenue today, Walmart, brought in $559 billion last fiscal year."

"A trillion in revenue will require stealing markets from incumbents. It’s already happening in Big Tech: Amazon flew head-on into the cloud, Microsoft is eating gaming, and in the next decade we will see The Great Heist: $1 Trillion Edition."

"Apple’s sidearm is a thermonuclear device. Each bullet, an unmatched asset."

"Familiar operating system. For the wealthiest billion people on earth, iOS is the operating system of their life."

"Epicenter. The iPhone, the most successful consumer product in history, is the epicenter of tech. The phone contains speakers and microphones, a barometer, an accelerometer, a proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor, a gyroscope, and four cameras."

"And it connects a web of interfaced devices that meet you everywhere: living room (Apple TV), kitchen (HomePods), keys (AirTags), ears (AirPods), and wrist (Apple Watch)."

"Beachheads. Apple has established a beachhead in multiple businesses beyond its core hardware products, including payments (Apple Pay, Apple Card, Apple Cash), games (App Store, Apple Arcade), media (Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple News), mapping (Apple Maps), cloud and email services (iCloud), and even advertising (App Store Search Ads)."

"Hardware expertise. As capital increasingly funneled to a monster that would eat the world (software), Apple further differentiated its hardware competence."

"There are dozens of great software firms, but scant firms (i.e., one) that have dominated hardware for decades."

"Nobody rivals Apple’s refined hardware or ability to produce actual things on a global scale."

"Trust."

"One of the great brand moves in history was anticipating the increasing relevance of privacy and staking huge capital and focus on it. Apple’s much vaunted iOS tracking change was a ninja move, registering damage not from sheer force, but by striking where it hurts the most."

"Capital. In 2021, Apple generated an astounding $93 billion in free cash flow (operating cash flow minus capital expenditures), which are funds it can allocate toward new opportunities."

"Apple could swallow all these firms and the total haul would represent a smaller acquisition, on a relative basis, than Salesforce buying Slack."

"Tim Cook’s mantra is “the intersection of hardware, software, and services.”"

"Apple Pay removes at least five steps of motor function required to pull out a credit card."

"Mobile gaming is a nearly $100 billion market, larger than PC and console gaming combined, and 45% of it flows through the iOS App Store, where Apple charges a mob-like 30% toll."

"You’d pay one monthly fee for all your Apple needs. The company currently offers AppleOne, combining the company’s media and cloud services, and, separately, the iPhone Upgrade Program, which offers a new iPhone annually in return for a monthly fee."

"Apple could/will offer checking/savings accounts with modest tweaks to existing features."

"Search is the most potent advertising channel in history."

"Apple is already in this business, albeit in a smaller way, selling ads against App Store searches. Search is too big to ignore."

"Keeping iOS searches inside the Apple ecosystem, and integrating results with the contacts, calendars, locations, and other data in that ecosystem, would make the whole show more valuable (and undermine the value of Google’s ecosystem), driving year-over-year growth in Apple’s iCloud subscriptions and its soon-to-be-supercharged rundle."

"The search giant has structural advantages thanks to its role across the ad ecosystem, two decades of advertising AI expertise, and the absence of any moral compass."

"Apple is continuing to build an array of sensors (hardware) and data mining and analysis tools (software)."

"Unless CVS starts putting devices in customers’ hands, the best decision it can make is to pay to become the default integrated health-care provider on the iPhone — the medical version of the Apple-Google search contract."

"Nike makes nearly $50 billion in annual revenue. This is a $20 billion business for Apple by 2030."

"The current Apple Home offering is weak, but once the company aims that $22 billion R&D cannon at it, the Apple brand will be a huge differentiator in a category that involves listening to your every word and watching your every move."

"The Apple car is in the works, and it could transform the company’s business just as the iPhone did."

"Tesla controls roughly 70% of the U.S. EV market today and does more than $50 billion in revenue per year."

"The breadth of Apple’s ecosystem will sweep up many more relatively small opportunities. Anywhere that requires an ID to enter could turn that infrastructure over to Apple."

"Apple could become the operating system of education — an alchemy of Chegg, Coursera, and Udemy: $2 billion per year."

"It’s an inevitable part of the tech cycle — innovation sparks in the consumer space, but as the tech matures, the smart players head where the real money is … the business-to-business economy."

"Mobeewave develops technology that lets smartphones process payments with the tap of a credit card. In other words, it turns iPhones into credit card readers."

"Today, Apple relies on AWS and Google to supplement its own data centers, just to handle its consumer iCloud business."

"But the company is one of the largest data center operators in the world, and it’s finishing a five-year, $10 billion expansion. It’s only a matter of time before Apple flips the script and offers its own commercial cloud services."